Virtual Environments: Grouping the Parts

Well job one with this task was to import all the files into one scene - the sheer complexity and amount of polygons i think almost overloaded the PC, the filesize turned from an already large 33mb file into a gigantic 100mb file, the core 2 quad PC's in the labs had a job to handle it.

Keeping the task in mind, we piece out the items separately looking at the scales and overseeing any potential problems with grouping and placing the objects together. upon Importing, there were several issues to be overcome, we had the issue of different peoples parts they had created some being massive and some being tiny, we had overlooked scale to a vast majority and had to sort out these issues quick, we couldn't spend long time dealing with scale issues because it would eat into our vital animating time, but none the less, it was a job that had to be done, so me and Matt franklin, another member of the group took on the task of sorting out the engine parts.

in the picutre above, we have scaled most of the parts and put them into place, this was quite a big task in itself but with two of us, it happened a bit quicker, however in the picture there are still some major things to be dealt with, such as the bars not linking up, small parts from the engine which had been overseen initially now needed to be created to finish off this part.

Above is one of the arms that rotates on the rotation of the wheel, however the part in question consisted of about 40 smaller parts that needed to be grouped together and the bar at the end needed extending to meet its point, so it needed to be ungrouped, rotated so that it could be scaled and then moved back down so we could check it was the right length:

Grouping the Items back together after scaling:

Adjusting the pivot point:

Putting it back in place:

Adding the wheels:

Next, we found that the u bracket around the linkage I had created was far too wide compared to the actual linkage which was a silly error to make seeing as I had created both of them, so back into the version I had of this part to quickly edit the width and re-import it back into the scene:

Next came the business of adjusting the pivot points preparing for animation on the parts we knew were finalised, so not to delay, we edited the pivot point onto the U-bracket we just edited:

This picture shows you where the part is now rotating thanks to editing the pivot point:

The U-bracket was cloned and twisted to be used for the one underneath;

Adjusting the brackets into position:

Adjusting the pivot point of the big linkage that I created:

Developing a missing part on the side of the machine, consisted of a few cylinders, editing the vertices to taper the end and rotating one of the other cylinders because it rides up at an angle:

Putting a taper on the edge:

rotating the next cylinder up at the required angle:

Created a rectangle and then rotated it round so it was in a diamond shape and curved the edges using the edit vertex option:

placed into position on the front of the cylinder and attached:

Cloning one of the arms to use as the cylinder that links to this part:

extra cylinder to add on where the cylinder moves in:

wireframe birds eye view of the engine as it currently stands:

One obvious problem and we don't know where it occured but there was an issue with the wheel which couldn't seem to be sorted using meshsmooth or turbo smooth so unfortunately parts of it had to be recreated:

you can see the jagged edges which unfortunately couldn't be removed to our knowledge, you can see a render of the recreated wheel in a few screenshots time.

Next job was to edit the base as and where we had to make it as close to the shape of the real life model, here are polygons seletced ready to delete: